Double Booker Prize nominee Pat McCabe was Tom’s guest for Back to Mine this week. McCabe is best known for his novels ‘The Butcher Boy’ and ‘Breakfast on Pluto’, both of which were made into successful films by Neil Jordan.

Growing up in Clonis, McCabe reminisced that, in fact, he became a writer as a child.

“I’ve been a writer since I was eight years of age,” he said. However, he always knew that, perhaps, he couldn't survive through writing alone. He was a school teacher for many years. “I couldn’t wait to get out of it,” he said. "Teaching is a rather conservative profession, according to McCabe and he feels that “the imagination should be unfettered”.

McCabe’s first song pick for ‘Back to Mine’ was ‘An Awful Lotta Woman’ by Skid Row. He feels that Gary Moore and Brush Shiels were “prodigies at work...Gary’s guitar playing is jazzy...the playing is very clean, very beautiful,” he added.

For his second song pick, McCabe chose ‘Dublin’ by Thin Lizzy. “There is a powerful sense of Dublin in it,” he explained. “You can almost smell the hops”.

Finally, he chose ‘Welcome Home’ by Peters and Lee to close the interview out.